Improving Azure Security

Many system vulnerabilities have emerged recently that are crippling businesses, forcing them to re-evaluate their current infrastructure and invest on modern technologies to remain protected and compliant. With that in mind, cloud providers have transformed from viewing security as a major concern to using security features to drive cloud migrations. 

Microsoft Azure is capable of transforming your business’s security needs by adhering to both international and industry-specific compliance requirements, ensuring data integrity, confidentiality and 24/7 availability. When configured correctly, Microsoft Azure can provide stability and visibility of your whole organisation’s security structure.

In this article, we look at the built-in capabilities of Microsoft Azure’s security, which touches on 6 areas: operations, applications, storage, networking, compute and identity. 

Operations

In operations, you can have a comprehensive view of your IT security posture by using built-in search queries in the security and audit dashboard.

When deploying solutions in Azure, use template-based deployments in Azure Resource Manager to integrate standard security control settings. Utilize Azure's Application Insights tool to automatically detect anomalies live on your web applications.

Azure Security Center has a dashboard that displays alerts and recommendations that can alert you on any security-related events generated in Azure logs. For forensic purposes and other security issues, consider implementing Log Analytics, which collects telemetry from various sources and uses the query languages from Data Explorer to extract and analyse data.

Application

To safeguard your applications, start with a one-click vulnerability scan on any app to test its security stability. You can perform penetration tests with the Azure penetration testing process and protect your web applications from attacks like SQL injection and session hijacking by using the Web Application Firewall (WAF).

Moreover, App Service Environments, usually integrated into Azure VNets, can help your developers create a layered security architecture, which can be further reinforced by using Network Security Groups (NSGs) to ensure that every application tier has different levels of access. A Network Security Group is a firewall that enhances packet filtering to control traffic between subnets or between an Azure VNet and the internet.

Storage

Secure your Azure storage accounts with Role-Based Access Controls (RBAC). Using the need-to-know and least privilege access principles, where groups and users are granted access rights only to a certain scope, according to their roles, is imperative for the organisation. If a need arises, where a client needs specific access to your resources, use Shared Access Signature (SAS) to grant limited permissions. 

With Azure Storage, you also have the capability of encrypting data being transmitted across your network. Client-side encryption or transport-level encryption are all viable methods to ensure data encryption. Likewise, Azure Storage Analytics can assist in tracing and analyzing usage trends and requests on your storage accounts. 

Networking

The goal of network security is always to ensure that resources such as virtual machines are only accessible to the intended users and devices. Expand your on-premises network to the cloud by using Azure Virtual Network and have complete control of your IP addresses block. You can also implement a VPN gateway to encrypt data between your virtual network and your on-premises network. 

To limit connectivity, use network access control. You may also use forced tunneling and User-Defined routes to customize traffic paths and ensure that data passes through assigned devices and secured routes. Tunneling prohibits services from initiating a connection on other devices in the internet. 

Azure Application Gateway provides in-depth layer 7 load balancing capabilities such as failover and performance-routing requests between servers. It has an additional web application firewall feature that protects any web application using the gateway.

Compute

Many security vendors provide anti-malware that you can use to protect your virtual machines from threats. Microsoft Antimalware is an Azure Cloud Services feature (though it can also be deployed using Azure Security Center) that detects malicious software, provides configurable alerts and helps remove viruses.

As highlighted earlier, encryption is important to ensure security, but encryption alone is not sufficient unless the keys themselves are stored properly. Azure Key Vault makes this possible. Azure Key Vault is also integrated with Azure Disk Encryption, which helps you encrypt VM disks. 

As unforeseen events can and do happen, be it application errors corrupting data, or plain human error, it is important to back up your data using Azure Backup. This, combined with Azure Site Recovery warrants business continuity in case of disasters. 

Identity and Management

Lastly, identity-based access controls are important for securing systems and data. Identity access management establishes that critical information is protected from unauthorized access while remaining accessible to legitimate users.

Multi-factor Authentication accommodates a simple sign-on procedure with easy verification whilst providing robust authentication. Length and complexity requirements of passwords, coupled with account lockout feature after failed logins doubles up the platform's security. Moreover, integrated identity management creates a single user identity access across cloud platforms and internal datacenters, allowing you to maintain control of user identity authentication process.

Closing remarks...

One can greatly improve the security posture of their organisation by understanding Azure’s security tools and staying up-to-date on new security features from Microsoft. With the scope at which Azure has built-in security services across networking, identity, security management and threat prevention, you can implement a very robust and secure organisation structure that will save you lots of headaches and costs. If you master the ins and outs of Azure security, you can maintain your firm’s data integrity and meet your business goals with ease.